With Sabon, Tschichold not only created one of the best Garamond revivals to date, he also built what you might term on of the first “system fonts.” Commissioned by a German book printers’ guild, Sabon was intended for use on Linotype machines, Monotype casters, and also in hand-setting. Moreover, the appearance and functionality of the face in text was to be same in all of these media!

Sadly for Tschichold, all three of these mechanisms were quickly made obsolete by photo and digital typesetting. Yet his Sabon was converted into new formats, and is still available today: Sabon, Monotype Sabon. Porchez set out to create a better digital version, and so Sabon Next was born.

The OpenType Update

Now available for the first time in OpenType format, Sabon Next is more useful to designers than ever before. A part of Linotype’s Platinum Collection, the Sabon Next family includes 12 component fonts, all filled with helpful OpenType features.

Large and versatile, Sabon Next includes optical sizes for both Text and Display setting. The text sizes offer roman and italic variants in five weights, from regular to black. All of the OpenType fonts also include small caps, oldstyle figures, alternate glyphs, swash forms, ligatures, and lovely fleurons. Sabon Next’s lining figures are intentionally designed to be a little smaller than capitals. The character set supports all Latin-based languages found in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, including the Baltic states and Turkey.

Proven legibility. Even in newspaper printing!

For over five years, the professional publishing community world-over has relied on Sabon Next. Two brilliant examples of the type in use hail from Japan and Germany. First, Sabon Next was recently selected as one of the house types for Suntory (the Japanese beverage giant) to employ in their new corporate identity system. Additionally, Sabon Next is used by the Frankfurter Neue Presse daily newspaper as their base text face. The FNP was the first newspaper to select Sabon Next for its text face.

How did Porchez go about reviving Tschichold’s revival?

First he referred to the three original metal versions of Sabon: those for Linotype casting, Monotype machines, and hand-setting. The later was distributed by D. Stempel AG of Frankfurt. This version operated under less constraints than those for other platforms, so it seemed closer to Tschichold’s pure interpretation of the Garamond ancestors. It was only natural that Porchez based Sabon Next on this particular version. However, he also referred to original 16th century printed specimens of Garamond’s types, carefully improving the proportions of the existing digital Sabon as he went along.

More about the OpenType

Porchez has ensured that Sabon Next’s OpenType features meet every typographic desire. Below is an exhaustive list of what is included:

1.

Case forms: parentheses, brackets, and some punctuation marks change their vertical position when appearing with only capital letters

Superior and Inferior Figures, including parentheses and some punctuation marks

6.

Diagonal Fractions

7.

Tabular and Proportional Oldstyle Figures, including currency symbols

8.

Tabular and Proportional Lining Figures

9.

Small Caps, including currency symbols, parentheses, brackets, and some punctuation marks

10.

Stylistic Sets

11.

Alternates: different versions of certain glyphs for use at the end of a line, e.g. a, c, d, e, h, i, k, l, m, n, r, t, u, z, &, Q; each of these also contains an alternate for the respective glyph’s accented versions

12.

More Alternates: additional versions of capitals, alternate forms for the ligatures, a historical long-s, a wider euro currency symbol, and a slashed-zero

13.

Ornaments and Fleurons

These features are only accessible in applications that are OpenType-savvy, including the Adobe CS line and QuarkXPress version 7.0 and up.

Sabon Next is an OpenType family with TrueType outlines (OpenType TTF). This ensure cross-platform compatibility between the Mac and PC into the future, and it also improves upon the on-screen display of the fonts in common Office applications on Windows PCs.

Examples of Sabon Next in use

Sabon Next online publication

We are sure this 28-page brochure will appeal to you with its comprehensive information and extensive illustrative material on Sabon Next.

Sabon Next, along with Avenir®Next, Compatil®, Eurostile® Next, Frutiger® Next, Optima® nova, Univers® Next (formerly Linotype Univers), Palatino® nova and Syntax® Next (formerly Linotype Syntax) belongs to the typefaces of the Linotype Platinum Collection.
These fonts were carefully digitized and have the high quality demanded by professional typography. All fonts of the Platinum Collection were produced according to the Linotype tradition of quality.
Linotype and its authorized partners offer these fonts as Platinum Collections CDs or as single fonts or value packs.